The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
The wide range of utility provided by pickup trucks has contributed to their popularity of ownership and use by individuals as a daily driver vehicle in recent years. And of course pickup trucks have been extremely popular for many years as critically important vehicles for use with various types of businesses, particularly those associated with construction and the building trades.
Pickup trucks are ideally suited to carrying items that are too large to place in the interior of a large SUV or van. However, when carrying elongated items such as ladders, kayaks, canoes, building materials such as elongated metal piping or conduit, or long lengths of wood trim, specialized components have generally needed to be used with a pickup truck to allow convenient transport of such elongated items. The foregoing mentioned items are often too long to be simply placed in the bed of a pickup truck and transported with the tailgate of the vehicle lowered. More typically, some type of external support system, for example a ladder rack, may need to be installed in the bed of the vehicle. Such a rack is typically desirable because it allows at least a portion of the length of such articles, and sometimes a majority of the length of such articles, to be transported while positioned above the cab of the vehicle. In this way the articles either do not project at all past the tailgate, or they will project to a much lesser degree beyond the tailgate. However, such external ladder style racks typically require tubular vertically oriented support members to be non-removably mounted in the bed, and these can often consume valuable usable space within the bed. Since they are typically non-removably mounted, they will consume space in the bed even when the ladder rack is not being used to transport articles. Still further, such ladder racks are not always well suited to transporting especially long recreational items such as kayaks and canoes because such items often will still need to be positioned on the ladder rack uprights such that they extend an unacceptably long distance behind the tailgate of the pickup truck.
Simply placing a conventional article carrier rack, which typically includes a pair of cross bars, on the roof of the cab of a pickup truck may not be an ideal solution for transporting especially long items such as ladders, kayaks, canoes, etc. This is because the relatively short longitudinal length of the cab often does not allow for sufficient longitudinal spacing for the support cross bars, which will be supporting the elongated articles thereon, to securely support the elongated articles.